Maud could hear Jess’s voice, or what she thought of now as her voice, husky, as if she’d just woken up. She pulled the answering machine out, too, plugged it in, and played it.
There it was, tinny on the cassette: You’ve reached Jess—and here, Maud’s voice, chiming in—and Maud Winters. You know what to do and when to do it, so do it. Then Jess’s honking laugh, before the beep. Maud rewound the tape and played it again. And again.
Maud could see Jess sitting there, hunched over the desk, filling the pages with her looping scrawl. Back then, Maud had thought this was normal, a good sign. A teenage girl writing in her diary—thank god. She had believed Jess was working out her anger and hurt about the divorce, getting it down, getting it out. And then came Thanksgiving. Maud could still taste the mouthful of dry turkey she’d been chewing, could still see Rachel’s dark eyebrows pulled tight together, Dani putting her forehead down on the table and retching onto the carpet. Adam, pale as the mashed potatoes. And Jess: hiding her face behind her brown curls, eyes gleaming, cheeks flushed, flapping her hands as if she could shake it away.
She flipped to the last page, where she’d taped Jess’s final note:
Mom,
I’m going out for a walk (it’s about 4:45). I need to clear my head. I’ll be back in a couple hours. Don’t worry.
Love, J-bird
Maud closed the notebook. None of it mattered now. None of it helped. No answers, no hidden clues. All suspects with airtight alibis. The prevailing theory: Just another teenage runaway who didn’t want to be found.
Except Jess wouldn’t have run. Maud knew it. She knew that much.
The letter was like all the others in the past few years: handwritten address, thin, maybe a sheet or two. Maud never took birthday cards. Never bills or credit card statements or envelopes marked Urgent. Never postcards. She never kept a letter for long, a day or two at most. When she finished, she always resealed it with a glue stick and shuffled it in with the outgoing mail. She always delivered it. It wasn’t stealing in the strictest sense, but it was definitely tampering and a gross violation of privacy; if caught, she would be fired. She didn’t do it for the thrill, or to snoop, or to meddle. She didn’t have bad intentions.
She did it because after eighteen years, every time she opened her own mailbox, she still held her breath. Every time, she shuffled through the envelopes, looking for the scrawl she knew by heart. Every time, nothing. She couldn’t count how many letters she had carried and delivered throughout her life. She could see the scads of them in her mailbag, feel the rough fibers, their sharp corners as she slid them into boxes. Thousands upon thousands. She wanted only one.
The letter she had today was addressed to Laura Drennan and was from Mr. and Mrs. Robert and Ellen Drennan. Her parents, Maud guessed; the penmanship was neat, tight cursive—the mother. Maud held it up to the lamp. Looked like one folded sheet.
As she eased her opener under the loosened flap, she pictured Laura Drennan standing on her porch, wearing those saggy clothes. Her face, in all those times Maud had shouted at her: a bird that had flown into a window, stunned into stillness.
And Maud remembered Rachel Fischer saying that—“I feel as though I’ve smacked into a window. Flying along fine, and bam.” She’d shown up one afternoon at Maud’s house some months after Jess hadn’t come home, months after Maud had delivered the letters Rachel blasted across town, only later learning their contents: “Dear Sycamore Friends: I write to tell you some news.” In the return address field, she’d used their stamp—“Adam Newell and Rachel Fischer-Newell”—and scratched out his name and her hyphenate with blue ballpoint pen. She hadn’t named Jess, had written only “an underage girl.” Maud had stared through the screen at Rachel, who stood on the step, cradling a bottle of wine and crying so hard she couldn’t speak. Finally, Rachel had said, “I wished bad things for him. For her. But I never wished for this. Never.” Maud had opened the door.
Now she set the unopened letter on the ottoman.
She looked out the window. The rain had stopped, the low-hanging sun breaking through unsettled clouds. Friday. Happy hour. She ran her hand over her frizzy curls.
Rachel didn’t answer the front door. Maud peered through the sidelight window. No movement, no flicker of the TV. No Hugh in the kitchen, with his loud, tuneful whistle even Maud could hear. No one home. Maud got in her car and started to drive home, but at the intersection of College Drive, she took a right instead of a left, toward the District.
In the Pickaxe’s lot, Maud parked next to Luz’s zippy red convertible and stepped out into the humid evening, her flip-flops crunching on the gravel. She looked at the little red car and some part of her reached back, saw herself at twenty-one, just starting out. Back then, she’d been waiting tables at a sandwich shop near the Phoenix community college where she met Stuart in her Intro to Art History class, tumbling in and out of his bed and marrying him within six months. At the sandwich shop, she’d set down plastic baskets and big red tumblers on the checkered tablecloths, and she’d pause to look at the shining band on her left finger, thinking how lucky she was to find her true love, thinking of her future: they would finish college, get good jobs, buy a little house with a yard, travel the world. Simple, happy. On her and Stuart’s weekend honeymoon in Mexico, in the months before she’d gotten pregnant and taken the civil service exam and started her career as a letter carrier—in her father’s footsteps, as it were, though he’d wished her a different path—she’d stood on a balcony naked and watched the sunrise while her new husband slept. Watching the shimmering expanse of the Gulf, she’d thought, There’s the whole wide world, and she stretched to her tiptoes, reaching for it.
Now Maud reached for the bar’s door handle, holding her breath.
Inside the front door, Maud let her eyes adjust to the dimness. Luz stood with some coworkers near the pool table. Luz looked toward the door. “Hey, it’s Maud! Mamí! You came!” She waved her arms as if hailing a ship.